The Arithmetic

I am writing this in the one notebook I keep in a locked drawer, in a house full of locked drawers, which tells you everything about this family that I am not going to elaborate on.

Fifteen years I was angry at Callum Kell for ending it without a reason, and the reason, when I finally had it, did not make me less angry. It moved the anger somewhere worse. And then I let him into the house anyway, because the body keeps its own counsel and does not consult the part of me that holds grudges for a living.

People think controlled means cold. That is the thing they get wrong about him, and the thing I got wrong for fifteen years. Controlled means there is a great deal held back. When he finally stopped holding it back, with my spine against that cold kitchen wall, what undid me was not anything he did. It was the arithmetic of it. Fifteen years of a man keeping that much in, and then not, all of it arriving at once, on me, in a silent house. I made a sound I have not made since I was young enough not to know what it was worth.

I told him not to be careful. I have had careful. I had a whole marriage of careful. He listened the way he listens to everything, completely, and then he was not careful, and I would do it again tonight, and I am going to do it again tonight, and this notebook is the only place those two sentences will ever live.